macrumors newbie

I didn't know that MacOSX used fstabs. It has that fstab.hd file that says its deprecated but no fstab by default. Once you pointed me to the man page, and after hitting myself in the forehead for having not looked at it before, it only took me 10 minutes or so to figure it out.

I still don't know the answer the original question about how MacOSX determines what to mount where. But I do know how to work around it.

I like to have my Applications directory on a separate partition. That makes life easier when I FUBAR my / filesystem as I don't have to install all my apps again. I've tried symlinks and such but whatever I try never quite works right. But now my fstab reads:

The first line tells MacOSX to not automatically mount disk0s5 to /Volumes. The second line tells it where I want it mounted. Being it is a rather important directory for the OS to work, I use the "union" option so that the original files are still accessible from /Applications. Big win should my mount fail.

macrumors 6502a

By default MacOS X mounts everything that it can. So there is something that is keeping your final disk from mounting. My guess is that there is probably something in syslog that will tell you what it is thinking. There might be something in /var/log/system.log, but I would go the full route and use this right after you boot:

Code:

sudo syslog -B

That will get you all of the messages since the machine booted. Usually there is a bit of extra debug spew in there that does not make it into any of the text log files.

macrumors 6502

Tinker Tool seems to be the way to go. Under 10.8.2 I edited /etc/fstab as described to prevent mounting & it didn't seem to work. Tinker tool launched & thought the mount was prevented, but it wasn't. I deleted that line in TinkerTool, then re-added it using the tool, and voila, my old 750Gig HD (in the optical bay of my MBP doesn't mount when I boot) and I silent and still off the SSD. Happy camper. Thanks for the pointer.

macrumors 6502a

Actually, that might solve ShadowMac's problem. I
But it does not answer my question. I need to know how Mac OS X decides which drives to automount at boot. Mac OS X obviously doesn't rely on fstab to make that decision.

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